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RESCUE TEAMS PACK UP

Hopes fade for quake survivors

Afp, Muzaffarabad
Rescue operations wound down yesterday six days after a massive earthquake as relief teams switched attention to helping millions of destitute, although the military said it was not giving up hope.
More bulldozers and heavy earthmoving equipment arrived in this devastated capital of Pakistani
Kashmir as rescue experts said it was nearly impossible for people to live so long under the rubble.
"This is day seven, with the low temperatures the chances of survival are very minimal -- now we'll assist the people who are alive," said British rescuer Stuart Downes who was preparing to leave Muzaffarabad.
However, Pakistan's chief military spokesman said no decision had been made to end the search for survivors of the earthquake which killed more than 25,000 people in the country and left 2.5 million others homeless.
"We have not lost hope for survivors to be found. Relentless efforts continue to rescue the survivors and at the same time relief efforts are in full swing," Major General Shaukat Sultan told AFP in Islamabad.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of bodies remain beneath the rubble, including many children who were buried alive at their desks when their schools collapsed around them.
Pakistani and UN officials have said the death toll is sure to rise significantly as the rubble is cleared.
Sultan was responding to comments by Major Farooq Nasir, the spokesman for the army's emergency relief operations in Muzaffarabad, who said: "We have moved from search and rescue to search and recovery".
"The technical teams have told us the chance of survival is now less than two percent," he said, adding that a decision to end rescue missions was taken overnight in a meeting between army officers and aid agencies.
Army teams would now begin clearing the rubble and spraying the wreckage with disinfectant, Nasir said.
In one last dramatic mission, rescuers worked through Wednesday to retrieve a woman found alive in a collapsed house in Muzaffarabad's old city but she apparently died when an aftershock struck Thursday morning.
The chief UN coordinator in Muzaffarabad said Friday that a decision had been taken not to assign new rescue missions to international teams.
"According to the information we were given last night, no new missions were assigned. But if rescue teams want to go out on the ground themselves they can go," Alain Pasche told AFP.
"The authorities are not assigning new missions."
Almost all the specialist foreign search and rescue teams who rushed to the region in the wake of Saturday's 7.6 magnitude quake have now left the disaster area.
However at Balakot to the west of Muzaffarabad, a team from Azerbaijan was still working Friday morning, an AFP journalist saw.
"There is always a chance after the rescue team leaves people can be found alive," said Stef Hopkins, a member of British team Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters.
"As they take the building apart with heavy equipment they always start to find people that we with our light equipment could not find and could not physically reach."
Fellow team member Geoff Parkinson said some rescuers would go to the capital Islamabad in the hope of being redeployed to areas where there still could be people trapped alive under the rubble.
"We would have liked it if some of the teams could have been assigned a helicopter so they could have jumped from village to village in the remote areas," Parkinson said.
"We could have made a difference."